Why Cults Like to Dress Alike
The red ties that bind
Photo by Allen Beilschmidt sr.
The recent Trump hush money trial has given us still another glimpse into conventional cult behavior.
Cults thrive on their ability to control information; what comes in and what goes out is critical to controlling the behavior and beliefs of those within the cult, aka, the members. Cults strive to create an impenetrable information bubble around their members, and the methodology is always the same:
Create incentives to limit information consumption to a single set of sources that will tell the members what they want to hear.
Delegitimize other sources of information by repeatedly claiming they are part of a conspiracy of mass deception.
Enlist the members to stigmatize any wavering from the cult-created reality, up to and including threatening the lives of the squishy and their families.
Applaud the dehumanization, denigration, and humiliation of those outside the cult.
Display and reward loyalty. Ridicule and purge disloyalty.
Through these actions, each member strengthens the cult and pays tribute to the leader.
One of the noteworthy elements of a cult is its uniform. The uniform serves several purposes; in sports, it is used to distinguish the members of one team from the other. In the military, it distinguishes friends from enemies and often provides functional protection (as in camouflage). In public safety, it allows citizens to instantly identify those responsible for protecting and serving them.
But sometimes a uniform has a different purpose. Anyone who has attended a large professional or college sports event will notice that the athletes are not the only ones wearing a uniform. The hometown fans will don their team's colors, and some will even paint their faces as a mass demonstration of their love and loyalty to their team. If you have been to the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup, you'll see many groups of fans waving the flags and wearing the colors of their home countries. These are individually motivated acts of loyalty, well-received, good-natured, and in the context of a competition governed by rules of fair play.
Sports is a cultural institution, and uniforms are cultural artifacts that display loyalty. Similarly, but for much darker reasons, cults tend to like uniforms: as a signal of loyalty, they help members differentiate themselves from non-members and maintain cohesion. At its most effective, the physical identity that a uniform delivers cultivates the emotional identity of the cult member and reinforces the most important element of all strong cults: the uniformity of thought.
In recent years, we’ve seen an uptick in groups of white male neo-Nazis come out of hiding wearing the “armor” of identical outfits: khakis, polo shirts, sometimes with masks, sometimes with tiki torches. The covering of one’s face is not unusual in a cult, whether it be with a mask, a bandanna, or a hood – all of it justified by the belief that everyone outside of the cult is conspiring to destroy them. But they clearly want to belong to something that doesn’t require a username and password (kudos to them for getting out of their mommy’s basement), and this is their chance. While they may not be wearing an official uniform, it is enough for them to feel like they are (finally) part of something, even if the most important part of their uniform is their skin color.
And that brings us to the cult of Donald Trump, in which uniformity of thought is mandatory. Trump rallies are very much like sports events, except for the fact that many on the red team wish significant harm, if not eternal hell, for the blue team. The uniform is red hats, enhanced by apparel merchandise sales and a faux patriotic slogan, all of it in service to the cult and its leader. If you are a public figure, defying the cult or spurning the wishes of the leader will subject you to various forms of condemnation that include being yelled at in airports and threatened via an array of modern communications channels.
And so, for various reasons, including the desire to become his next vice-presidential pick, Trump’s political supporters began showing up at his hush money trial wearing identical navy-blue suits, white shirts and red ties.
It doesn't matter if their leader slept with a porn star, had an affair with a Playboy model, reveled in his entitlement to grab women’s genitals (“When you’re a celebrity, they let you do it”) and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover up as much of it as he could to get elected. These so-called leaders of our country, including one who is second in line to the presidency, were there in uniform, with ties blazing, peacocking their loyalty to the leader of their cult. This was the moment they chose to visibly place their loyalty to Trump above the American judicial system – an institution that relies on the trust, faith, and loyalty of the American people.
And now even Nikki Haley – our once great hope to help the Republican Party finally transcend Trumpism – has succumbed to the cult. All of the integrity, honesty, courage, and patriotism (the real kind) that we thought we saw in this person has been transactionally liquidated in exchange for a craven pursuit of the only thing she really cares about – her own power. Her rationalizations are astounding, her submission to the cult, tragic.
George Orwell helped us understand the malleability of human reality when he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
And because of that, whatever noble assertions made by Haley in the past can now be deposited in a memory hole. To “Make America Great Again” is whatever the cult says it is.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
When you’re a cult leader, they let you do it.